Kino MacGregor - Be Stronger

Full transcript: Kino MacGregor on London Real

5:49 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Keno McGregor, the international yoga teacher, author and entrepreneur. You’ve written four books and have co-founded the Miami Life Center, as well as the very first yoga television channel, Omstarz, which launched earlier this year. You are one of a select group who received certification to teach Ashtanga yoga from the very founder himself in India.

6:10 And you now travel the world helping others learn this practice. Your new book, The Yoga Assignment, is out soon. Keno, welcome to London Real. Thank you. It’s my pleasure to be here.

6:19 It’s awesome to be here. I was wondering, when you land in London, do you consider our city one that has any yoga game? Yoga game. Are we up the curve when it comes to this practice? Well, actually, I’m here in London this time to take classes with my teacher’s grandson, Arsharat Joy.

6:36 So he’s here and there are probably somewhere between 200 and 400 people total for all of his classes. So I would say that yoga is really popular here in London. Whenever I come here to teach, I feel really welcomed by the yoga community here. And I feel like London and the United Kingdom in general really embraces yoga. Is it because it’s kind of got that colonial British connection?

7:00 And so we’re up the learning curve in kind of more Indian practices, food, culture, or do you think it’s something else? Gosh, I hadn’t really thought of it like that. I feel like the thing that most draws people into the practice is the idea of the search for meaning and the search for something real. And I feel that the more sort of material possessions one has, the more we realize that permanent happiness cannot lie in the accumulation of material possessions or material wealth.

7:32 And perhaps it’s logical for a former colonial power to realize that happiness has to be found within rather than in the world without. You remind me of my shaman, my ayahuasca shaman, and I did some ceremonies with her and she’s like, I want to go back to the jungle. But the plant medicine says, my work is needed here in these urban environments where everybody gets a little mental. We get caught up with the Joneses. We worried about our title and our possessions and all that stuff.

8:02 Do you think kind of yoga is needed even more in these major urban centers? I feel like yoga is needed more in every human being because the human struggle, you know, is is so essential to the yoga journey. And the human struggle is really who am I, what am I worth, where do I come from, right? And the more disconnected we are from our purpose and our meaning, the more we need that. And I’m finding that people as much in the cities are really yearning for that as much as people who say live remotely and are trying to find meaning in their lives.

8:35 So I almost feel because I get this benefit of traveling the world and seeing really people from all over the world. I mean, I’ve been already to Asia and Australia and traveled a bit around Europe. And then been all over the Americas already this year and the years when I’ve been over yet. And I think what what I’m noticing globally is that we’re all searching for the deeper questions, answers to the deeper questions. And it’s the idea of value and the idea of worth.

9:02 Where does self worth truly come from? Who am I? Where do I come from? What am I worth? Why am I here and what my purpose is?

9:09 And yoga gives you a tool to be able to find that answer for yourself, to be able to really attune your inner hearing so that you can kind of hear what I like to call a quiet voice of wisdom that’s always been with you and is always ready to speak to you at any moment. And it’s really through the quietness and the stillness of the mind that I think we can find that voice, that wisdom. And that’s the sense of that’s real truth. You know, and I think we’re all searching for that.

9:35 I almost feel globally that it seems a little bit like there’s a critical mass and we’re searching for meaning and we’re searching for a way out of maybe what has been the accumulation of the idea of the rat race, getting somewhere through the accumulation of things, of objects, of materialism. And it’s almost like globally, I feel like we’ve exhausted materialism. You know, we’ve perhaps even exhausted our material resources. We’re reaching resource scarcity in certain places and we’ve reached the end of materiality.

10:04 And it’s the idea that now, again, I feel there’s almost a global shift of where’s the deeper truth. Are we ready for it globally? I mean, I really hope we are. Yeah, and I do too. What are some of the signs you see that we’re at this critical point where it’s like, oh my gosh, this can’t be sustained or these people are obviously kind of breaking down a little bit?

10:25 Well, gosh, I think I see that in how many people have followed a career path that had been given to them. So, you know, we’ve been fed these things, myself included, you know, get a good job, get a good education, earn a good living and retire someday. So there’s this sort of dream of consumerism. This dream of, you know, you could even say the corporate dream, you know, or get a good education and get a good job and save money and retire. And there’s many people that they started that path and then at some moment they realized this isn’t going to make me happy.

10:57 And I meet people like this from all walks of life, from all countries, from all ethnicities, from all genders and all ages, that if some moment realized, hey, you know what? I’m going on this path and it’s not making me happy. I was on that path too and I woke up to a deeper truth at some moment. This may sound completely ridiculous, but I was on the path to, I really wanted to work in law. But from the time I was a little girl, I remember saying to my parents, I want to be a Supreme Court Justice in the United States.

11:25 I want to change the world. You know, I want to be a voice for minorities and I want to be a voice of justice and truth in the world. And I remember that I, you know, I started doing debate really intensively in high school to sort of get myself on that path and get into a good debate school. So then I could get into a good law school and then, you know, sort of go. I had the whole path.

11:43 And then there was a moment, a moment in my senior year in high school when the debate season had ended and I didn’t have to prepare for the next year because I was going to school, you know, going to college. And I had a few weeks off and I woke up up morning and I just took a breath in. I remember I woke up, I looked around and I thought, I am so much happier. And I scratched my head and I thought for a moment, I said, what’s missing? And I realized that what was missing was debate, which I suddenly realized I have dedicated the last four years of my life to scheduled arguing.

12:15 And I really saw debate as scheduled arguing. I argue with people on Saturday from 12 to 6 and then on Sunday, it’s my weekend. You know, again, I argue with someone again from 12 to 6 again and then we’re judged on who wins the argument. And I just had this sort of wake up moment of I don’t want this to be my life. I don’t want to do this.

12:32 So I just dropped that completely. And I, I was in a little bit of a searching state of where am I going to go from here and sort of what’s next? And I really had no idea. You were kind of depressed at 19, kind of wondering what was next. Disillusioned for sure.

12:47 Yeah. And did you not know whether you’re going to go to college at that point and didn’t know which way your life was going to go? Well, I knew I was going to go to college. I mean, I just felt like, well, I’ll still go to school. I guess I wanted out of my parents’ house and I mean, I love them dearly.

12:58 I guess it’s just every teenager wants out, right? So I knew I was going to go to school, but I had this, I had this sense of all the schools that I applied to were debate schools and pre-law schools. So I only had two schools that were not pre-law schools. So I felt like I applied to 10 schools. I think I got into nine out of 10 or something like that.

13:17 And then I sat with two of them that I was choosing between because all the other ones were this sort of trajectory that I just sort of took myself off of when I opened up to another reality. And I didn’t know where I was going to go from there and I wasn’t really sure. And, you know, I definitely was a little bit lost in searching for a period of time. Now, if I told the 19-year-old keynote that going inside your own body on a mat, maybe once a day for 45 minutes to 60 minutes will solve all of your problems, what would she have said?

13:45 I think she would have said, what exactly is it that I’m going to be doing on this mat? OK, because that same question is asked by a lot of newbies and even people watching us are going to be like, OK, how much can you get done with alone with yourself on a rubber mat? And you’re talking about it as the salvation and all of this amazing stuff. And how do you explain that to people? Well, I guess there’s two parts of it.

14:11 Right. So let’s address the part of aloneness. Yoga is never meant to be an entirely solitary experience, although it is a solitary and individual journey. Let me explain that a little bit more. You are meant to learn from a teacher.

14:26 You are not meant to sit there and think, well, what should I do today? I think I’ll forward bend or I think I’ll back bend. I think I’ll do this or I’ll do that. You’re meant to find a teacher who’s a guide. And the way that the yoga practice works is that someone who’s walked the path a little bit further holds a torch so you can follow in their footsteps.

14:41 And then because you have a teacher, then this idea of faith and this idea of trust opens up and this idea of understanding things that are not easily understandable by logic begin to really sort of take root in your heart. So first of all, you need a teacher. So for anyone out there feeling like, I just don’t know what to do. I’m on a sticky mat and I’m here floundering around. You need a teacher and teachers have become more accessible.

15:05 My first real teacher was all the way in India and I needed to travel all the way to India to meet him. Now you can have good guides that are available, at least at the introductory level online. And so you can really find that connection to lineage, to practice, to tradition and to real teachers in a just much more accessible way. So that’s sort of the first level. You’re never alone.

15:24 You shouldn’t feel like you’re floundering on your own. If you do, you need a teacher. All right. So that’s part of the process is this human connection, this trust, this learning of mastery from someone else. Absolutely.

15:36 And then the second part is really a notion that I call body intelligence. So we understand intellect, right? We understand it’s measurable. Your IQ, you can be sort of Mensa level IQ. You can sort of take a test and get into the gifted program as a young child.

15:50 And then there’s a recent development called emotional intelligence, right? The relatability and the empathy level that, you know, a person is able to really develop. And I feel like I want to present something new called body intelligence. How much is your presence, your awareness in your body? So this sort of modern life that you were mentioning before of, you know, we’re in cities and we’re running around and we have our to-do lists and we have all these things that are on our minds and we have a lot of things that are unprocessed, unfelt.

16:18 So I feel like what’s going on is at some moment we wake up and realize that there is an unlived life and there’s an unfelt body. So there’s this body that we have and we treat it, you know, just as a place for our heads to rest on this thing and carry our heads around. And there isn’t a sense of aliveness, of feeling in the body. So the first thing that yoga really asks you to do is by twisting your body into these positions that are not always comfortable, you begin to feel areas of your body that are on lockdown that have, that you’ve really exited at some moment in your life.

16:49 We exit the body for a variety of reasons, primarily trauma. When the present moment is too hard for us to deal with, we cut off a part of our body and we sort of detach ourselves from it. We escape from the feeling rather than really be present to what we’re feeling. Is that intentional? Like, do I just cut off my liver or my leg?

17:08 I mean, is, or is that just something so conscious that happens? I think that the patterning is built, is sort of the patterning to escape or exit or cut off a part of the body is laid at such a young, at such a young age that it is not really a conscious choice. It’s not like someone’s, you know, you’re experiencing a difficult situation and you’re like, oh, let me not feel, you know, my legs because of this. It’s because something hurts you so much. You don’t have the ability to process it, to feel it.

17:34 You don’t have the training and the conditioning and really the mental courage to just open and be present with it. So it’s an automated response. It’s sort of just a natural protection that comes up, just like when you reach your hand into a flame, you pull your hand away from the flame. Okay. So we’ve kind of locked down parts of our body.

17:51 We don’t know we’re doing it and we don’t give our body the credit of it having feelings and kind of some kind of intelligence as well. Absolutely. Okay. Can you talk a little bit more about the intelligence in my body? Is it emotional intelligence?

18:04 What’s going on in there? Well, I feel like there’s both emotional intelligence and wisdom really in the body and a way for you to think about that is have you ever thought and thought and thought and thought and thought about an answer, but it just couldn’t come to you like a really important life decision and you think about it and you think about it and you think about it and it’s like, here are the five reasons why I should and here are the five reasons why I shouldn’t. And you sit and you, then you vacillate between these two extremes and then you, and you can go into that mental storm forever for the rest of your life.

18:31 You can debate it, right? That really can debate yourself. Should I do it? Should I do it? Should I not again, back and forth.

18:38 And then it hits you. Boom. Like a moment of clarity and you know it in your gut. This is what I’m going to do. So it’s wisdom.

18:44 And you said gut there. Yeah. And we use words like with my heart and it doesn’t feel right. Right. And so these are all references that our mind isn’t figuring out that there are something in our body that makes us feel something.

18:56 Absolutely. Okay. And we don’t honor it in our current Western world and in this Descartian view where everything happens up in the brain. I think therefore I am. Yeah.

19:04 Right. And then there’s the second though, right? I feel therefore I am, which is Rousseau, which is sort of a higher level. You could say, or not even a higher level. Cause I don’t like to think hierarchically because the thoughts are very important.

19:15 I think therefore I am, you know, the quality and nature of thoughts have the ability to really control what we’re expecting and our expectations from reality. I feel therefore I am is very identified with the emotions, right? And the emotions, the emotional world. But the body’s intelligence is neither thinking nor feeling, but is being. Right.

19:33 Right. Well, I started practicing some yoga about six months ago and I still want to hear what happened to you in India. So we will get back to this, but, um, I did it on the back of filming our first documentary film, which I think I mentioned to you, and it was one of our, our most watched guests of all time. It’s a six time Mr. Olympia, a guy who spent 17 years of his life building the, the, the biggest musculature possible.

19:56 Um, probably the opposite of what yoga would do. And, um, you know, he was known for being this bulk of 270 pounds, lean on stage and beating everyone in the world and being the most like developed male body on the planet. And he invited me down to Spain and he wanted to teach me how to lift weights was one thing, but he also wanted to show me his new yoga practice. And he got a message years ago that basically said to him, what’s wrong with your body? You can’t move it.

20:22 You can’t move your hips. And he just put the feelers out and he started practicing this yoga. And it’s this beautiful moment in this film where I take this guy that used to be this hulk of a man and we’re practicing yoga on the beach. And at the end of it, I almost cry and it’s this, all of these emotions came out and I find it with a simple yoga practice of an hour, sometimes things really come up out of my body. And I don’t know where these emotions and thoughts come from, but I must say there’s something there and I come from an engineering background.

20:50 I was very to Cartium for a long time. Literally my body was there to carry my brain to round to the next pleasurable experience. Yeah. And, um, but I can’t ignore there’s something here. You know, um, do you hear this a lot from people?

21:02 Uh, absolutely. You know, the, uh, this idea that the body can’t lie, you know, the body doesn’t lie and the mind can play mental gymnastics and trick itself into this or that and sort of, you can speak a lie with your mouth, but your body always tells the truth, right? And this is like what, what, um, good poker players call it a tell. Your body will always have a tell because your body’s telling the truth, no matter if you’re telling a lie. And this, this simplicity, this utter transparency of the body is something that yoga brings up to the surface in everyone, which is really, really beautiful because imagine if we could just be totally transparent and totally ourselves and totally in touch with all of all of our happiness and all of our joy, but also all of our pain and all of our loss and not need to cut anything off and just to be totally and completely presence.

21:48 So it forces you to be honest with yourself and be present with yourself. So back to some of these components of yoga. First of all, there’s a teacher there. So as a student teacher relationship makes you kind of embrace new things, trust, there’s a human component. Then there’s the time alone.

22:02 And then there’s the truth with the body. What are some of the other big components that you tell people when you describe yoga? Well, there’s an element of devotion and reverence, and this is the search for meaning, right? Because you may not realize that you’re searching for meaning or searching for depth, but I feel like what ends up happening is that as we begin to search or as we begin to feel, then what comes up, what we’re led to are these deeper questions, the spiritual questions.

22:32 And this is something that many people don’t realize when they come into yoga, is that yoga is a physical discipline with a spiritual intention. So it brings you through the physicality into something that is transcendent of the physical. And it’s almost like, hey, wait a minute. I didn’t, you know, I didn’t really realize I was, I was doing something spiritual. I thought I was just doing a forward bend.

22:53 But as you describe, you know, emotions come up to the surface. And then it’s almost as though when you finish your yoga practice, you go out into life and life looks a little different. Yeah. And it’s strange because I’ve trained Brazilian jiu-jitsu and I’ve lifted weights and I’ve done lots of body motion. But yet this, you know, practice of these positions on a mat in kind of this scheduled way and with this preciseness and body movement and tension and breathing takes my brain to some level that, you know, oftentimes would need, you know, a psychedelic component to go there.

23:24 Yeah. I still, it’s still flabbergasted me and yet I can regularly get there on a Monday afternoon. Yeah. How do you explain that to people? Well, gosh, I think the idea is that we all have the capability to know the deepest and most eternal truth.

23:42 We’re all built with that. It’s in there inside of us, you know, so it’s in you, it’s in me, it’s in everyone who’s watching. And it’s the truth of the sentient being, you know, we have a spark of the divine within ourselves and it’s all of the things that we do to divorce ourselves from that presence of divinity. And the yoga practice, I feel, is a gift of grace because it’s a tool that teaches you how to drop your mind into presence, to drop your mind back into that root, into the truth of who you really are.

24:13 We begin, you know, if we begin the traditional yoga teaching, yoga is the cultivation of the state of stillness. When the mind is still, you can perceive the truth of who you really are. All right. So who’s the truth of who you really are? You are not your thoughts.

24:27 You are not your emotions. You are not this body. You are a spark of divinity. You are a spiritual being. You are infinite and vast, you know, and worthy of love, made of love itself, made of light.

24:40 And then if we think about that as, you know, we’re walking down the street, it’s overwhelming, you know, if you think about as we’re getting on the subway or the tube, it’s, you know, no place to put it, but in the practice as the poses, this unique combination of these poses, which organize the body to bring your mind into unfelt places inside of the body, the breath, which ties your mind, the conscious and the subconscious mind together, as well as your focal point, which is redirecting the organs of the senses from the external world into the inner world. Though that unique combination brings you a moment and intimation, a memory, almost as though the shadow of the divine passes in front of your eyes. And it’s one of these things where traditionally it’s said that just to touch that for a moment, just to get a glimpse of that leaves you eternally changed forever changed.

25:25 When did you first feel that? Well, I think after my very first yoga class, um, my very first Ashtanga yoga class, um, I did a few, I did my first class when I was 19. And then I did some, some yoga out of books and some random classes, but when I was 22 years old, I walked into a guided Ashtanga yoga practice. And at the end of this practice, I still remember to this day, lying in the end in the final relaxation, my body was utterly exhausted, covered and drenched in sweat.

25:55 And then I just felt almost like the vibration of my body settle, and then there was this silence in my mind. So as though that stream of thoughts of likes and dislikes and preferences and just that never ending inner dialogue, it just stopped for a moment. And it was that silence that forever changed me. It just really kept me coming back for more because it opened up, it opened up my mind to the possibility of peace. It opened up my mind to the possibility that there could be silence because I think up until that moment, I never, never experienced the silence in the inner world.

26:29 And you didn’t have to go through 20 years of practice to get there. That would surprise most people. Well, I feel like most people who end up really, really committed into the practice very quickly have some kind of epiphany moment, some kind of spark, and then you spend the rest of your life kind of getting grounded in it, you know, because you can kind of get, you know, a high, but that, that initial kind of enticement, the way I think about this is, well, you’re married, right?

26:57 Yeah. Well, I’m cohabitating for a long time. Okay. So, yeah. Well, I’m married and I still remember the first moment that I saw my husband, right?

27:04 And so there’s that moment, right? A wow moment. And then there’s, there’s the excitement of, you know, you first meet them and something in your body kind of wakes up. And then if you’re going to stay together for a long time, right, then you have this idea that, hey, we’ve got to work at this, right? We need to, you know, learn how to respect and love each other and what that means, you know, in terms of respect and reverence and devotion and dedication.

27:29 And I think the cultivation of a lifelong practice is like that. We have that spark, that wow, that oh, that gosh of emotions, that rapturous ecstasy that comes. And then we realize, hey, we have to put in the work. Right. And that’s just like your practice.

27:44 So the excitement is going to go away. You can try to get back there to revisit that excitement, but that’s futile. You have to put the work in and then go to this long-term kind of respect of the art and respect for what it brings you every day and not go searching for those highs again. Well, what will happen is if you hanker towards the highs, then you’ve essentially traded in the addictive mind for yoga. And so then you’re searching for the next fantastic experience when the experience of your body today is the truth, right?

28:16 If you look, if you spend your life hankering or yearning for highs and running from intense lows, you’re essentially doing the opposite of yoga, yoga stillness, equanimity, being open and available to whatever is, whatever arises. And then what’s amazing with that is as soon as you get into that state, well, it’s like those little epic, those moments that you thought were epic in the beginning, that moment of wow, that moment of divine rapture, that one of the things happens is that you kind of slip into a state where it’s not that they’re not there, but they’re not as special anymore because you’re living so close to that state. Right.

28:50 You said before you’re a yogi 24 hours a day, not just when you’re teaching or practicing, can you explain that? Well, the commitment is not just to do the poses, right, but to really embrace the yogi life. And so this means that the practice has to change the way you inhabit the world and it needs to change and sort of bear impact on every decision. So to bring consciousness into every decision, there are moral and ethical precepts that are traditional in the yoga practice, but specifically what it means is being very, very aware moment to moment, you know, to ask yourself, is this, is this how I need to be asking or is this how I need to be acting right now?

29:25 So, you know, if you drive and someone cuts you off, do you need to honk your horn right now, you know, and it’s that, well, wait a minute, it may be due because it’s safety and you need to, you’re about to hit them and so you need to let them know. So maybe you do, or maybe you suddenly have an inner dialogue that you’re about to latch onto about how terrible all the drivers are and how no one drives well anymore and can you believe this and that it can go on and you can find yourself lost almost in a chance of complaints and as a yogi, that whole idea of the commitment to the yoga path is in that moment, you’ve got to do your practice, you’ve got to draw your attention inward, follow your breath, root into your body, be aware of the unpleasant vibrations of someone cutting you off in traffic and just observe them and feel them and as soon as you give them space, well, they’ll just go away, you know, every emotion is a shelf life as long as you’re not feeding it, right, so if you go and you’d latch into the complaint and then, oh my god, they’re a terrible driver and look at the car they have and da-da-da and then, you know, again, a trance and then you’re in this kind of trance state where your mind is hooked into that for who knows how long.

30:24 Is this something your guru teaches you or does this just become obvious? Gosh, that’s a really good question. My guru, Shri K. Patabi Joyce, whom I met in India, was sort of like Yoda, you know, a man of few words but very wise words and Guruji, as I called him, his instruction for the mind was you do your practice, you think about God, you live your life, you think about God, right, and so this is really the highest call to truth. And so he didn’t really, he wasn’t really into much specific instruction in terms of your psychological inner journey, there are some really important texts that will help, that can help give some direction on that, but this is something, again, the practice itself is the foundation.

31:08 If you take an action that is outside the yogic path, like if, say, on the way to your yoga class, you honked at someone and beeped at them and flipped them the bird or something, as soon as you’re practicing, that is gonna come up to the surface and you’re gonna feel this remorse, just the sense of, you know, did I really need to do that in that moment? Is that, you know, was that, did I really need that? Who knows, maybe they were rushing because they have a sick parent in the hospital, maybe they were out of it because their dog passed away, gosh, did I really need to beep at them, I’m so sorry.

31:39 Right, and so thinking of God, you didn’t have to describe what that meant, but you can take it on as thinking, okay, think of the higher power, the higher purpose, and that’ll get me out of the traffic that just got cut off. Absolutely. Okay. What was that like, going to India, studying with Guruji, right? You know, you’re this white American girl going over there.

32:02 Can you break it down? Like, what was it like, and what was it not like that I would expect it to be like in a Hollywood movie? Well, the first thing that it was was just very far away. It was just a very long airplane trip. I mean, it was almost 20 years ago that my first trip was, and so this was India, not as you would experience India today, but India before cell phones really hit the market, before the technology boom, sort of like a different India.

32:28 And in India, some part of my heart is nostalgic for it. Some part of my heart is really happy that there’s a new India. So, you know, the past is gone. We embrace it, we love it. And then there’s the turning of a new page and you love the new as well.

32:40 When I first went to India, I didn’t have anyone’s address except for Guruji’s address. So I remember that I read Guruji’s book and I knew I wanted to go to India. So I bought a ticket and I got a 10-year visa out of pure faith and because it was a better deal. I think that like the six-month visa was something like $100 and the 10-year visa was $120. So I felt this was a good deal.

33:04 My mom said, how do you know you’re going to like it? And I, you know, I said, it’s a leap of faith. And it was 24 hours of travel just to land in India. OK, where did you grow up? I grew up in Miami.

33:14 In Miami, OK. I’m a native Floridian. OK. Which was a rare variety, but there’s more of us now these days. OK.

33:21 And I landed in India. And the first thing that instilled to this day, it hits me every time I go there, how similar the plants are to Florida. So there are palm trees and palm trees in Florida. I was living in New York at the time when I went to India and I went to India and the temperature was more like Florida. So there was an element of my body that sort of felt comfy there because the humid air and the tropical sort of, you know, plants and the foliage around.

33:49 And it was, you know, quite familiar. It was completely non-familiar was the language, the people, the culture. I went into a car that was sort of called a taxi, these old ambassador kind of vehicles. I’d never seen one of those before and I got in the back and it was like a four and a half hour journey. And this car dropped me off at the house of Shri K. Pattavi Joyce, which is where he was teaching.

34:12 And I just dropped my backpack and walked in and Grigi was the first person I saw. And he looked and he had to write a letter in order to request being able to get into the Yogashala. And the rule was if you don’t hear back, you can go. What does that mean? That means you send this letter and you buy a ticket from Faith.

34:31 And if you don’t get a letter back from Grigi saying you can’t go, you’re good. OK, that’s fascinating. The opposite of like Travelocity confirmations or whatnot. You know what I mean? We get like a travel confirmation.

34:41 So that’s the first leap of faith, really. It was then. Now it’s now it’s much different. Now you get a little confirmation. Things are quite different now.

34:49 But, you know, so I dropped my backpack. I walked and I looked into Grigi’s eyes. And the first thing he said to me was, you wrote letter? And I said, yes, Grigi, I wrote the letter. Tomorrow is 6 a.m.

34:58 You come. First thing I did, my face was on the ground. My hands were on his feet in the traditional gesture of pranam. And I had all the people said you have to bow down to him. And I didn’t want to bow down to someone I’d never.

35:09 I didn’t know what this meant. I’m going to bow down to someone. I was studying feminist studies in graduate school. And I had I had, you know, spent a lot of time on the plane, thinking of how I was going to explain that while I do respect this as an element of traditional Indian culture, you see I’m a modern American woman and I don’t need to bow down to any man. Thank you very much.

35:27 And I had this whole spiel written in my head. And before I could say what was up or what was down, I was flat on the ground. My hands on his feet. Thank you, Grigi. It was like my heart leapt up and took over and I knew I’d met my teacher at that moment.

35:39 Why? Why did you do that? My heart just leapt up. You know, why do you fall in love with someone? You know, something in my heart just said yes.

35:45 Felt the energy. And I think what it was and I look back now and I can see there, I guess there are two things. The first is that I’d never met one like him in my life and it was just his presence, his power gave me faith and gave me hope. And it was as though it was in the presence of peace when I looked into his eyes. And so I wanted that.

36:03 So it was like something in me said yes. And the second thing was that he was an answer to a question that I was asking. I didn’t know I was asking it, which is, you know, how to believe in yourself, how to have faith. You know, and how can I live a more peaceful life? That’s really why I started the yoga practice.

36:18 And Guruji was that answer to me. And he gave me faith, hope and really a foundation for the practice. And I’m just so grateful for that. You know, there’s a line from our recent movie where Ido Portal says when you find the right teacher, learn whatever it is they have to teach you. Yeah.

36:34 Is this a component that you feel with him? As in he’s really teaching you about yourself. In this case, the practice was yoga or is it kind of more than that? Well, if you ask Guruji, you know, you asked him, oh, you’re such a special man. Like, oh, you must live in the state of what’s called in Sanskrit ultimate samadhi, which is like this final end result of the practice of yoga.

36:55 You’re in final peace. And Guruji would laugh and he would just say, I’m a simple man. Just they teach you ashtanga yoga. Inhale, raise your hands. Exhale, fold forward.

37:03 You know, and so he really was just presenting himself as just this, this, you know, yoga teacher. And that wasn’t a tongue and cheek joke. Yeah, no, he really bent it. He said it again and again and I think it’s the idea that he just wanted to be a person. I am a person.

37:20 I’m teaching you this method. Don’t worship me. You know, this is a method and it’s up to you to apply the method. And that was very important for him, the methodology of the practice. And at the same time, so there was always this, you know, this sort of dualism of I’m this simple person.

37:36 But when you were in his presence, there’s something that you realize, wow, you say that you’re simple, but whenever I’m with you, whenever I was with Guruji, it was as though all of my obstacles, all of my, you know, all of all of the things that were bothering me just if I were around him, he was in the room. It was like they were gone. Wow. And what did he teach you? Well, Guruji’s main lesson to me, so many, there’s so many lessons, right?

38:03 But Guruji’s main lesson to me specifically was to be stronger. And this is something I’m not a naturally strong person, not physically and also not emotionally. I can kind of cave in and cry and I used to have a really thin skin and just take everything really, really personally. But wait, you went to NYU, you got your master’s degree in feminine studies. You’re in the big city.

38:24 That doesn’t sound like a weak woman. No, I guess not. But I would at the same time fall apart like at every moment, you know, and and just take. And the other thing that I really kind of had kind of no backbone about is I used to say yes to everything, everything at all times, just like everything is OK. But, you know, sometimes things aren’t OK.

38:41 And, you know, so I just kind of was this amoeba that was just sort of floating around the world, you know, and practice wise, like I couldn’t do a headstand, I couldn’t do a push up to save my life. I was so weak. The idea of doing a handstand was beyond anything. And I mean, and another thing it was really difficult for me to take was criticism. You know, so if I did something and, you know, if I if I got a bad grade and something, it would break me, you know, and I just and if someone said some spoke harsh words to me, then it would really I would think about it for days and days and days after.

39:13 Remember it 10 years later, you know, and so so this sort of this would really affect me. And I remember Guruji is just saying to me whenever I reached a point of self-satisfaction, whenever I reached a point in my practice where I thought, OK, this is it. Kino, you have to be stronger. Kino, you have to be stronger. How strong do you need to be?

39:34 Kino, you have to be stronger. Just again. And when I thought I was stronger, when I thought this is it, when I thought these are all the poses I’m ever going to learn, I’m good, I can finally do that handstand. Kino, lift up more. Kino, you have to be stronger.

39:45 How strong do you need to be? You know, and I kept on thinking, like, what is this? And now I look at my life and I don’t know what it is and how Guruji saw this in me, but I have met so much criticism. I have met so much difficulty and adversity in so many situations in my life. I’m not someone that in my life people have told me yes right from the beginning.

40:06 Everything that I’ve done has been met with no, no, no. A thousand no’s. Kino, you have to be stronger. How strong do you need to be? Strong enough to believe in your dreams and never give up.

40:16 You want to try this headstand and you’re not going to do it? So this was my first time I did headstand, I fell over. I almost cried. Poor me. You know, I can’t do headstand.

40:25 Poor me, you know. And then I got up and I tried it again. Get back up, try it again. Okay, fall down again. Get back up, try it again.

40:31 Fall 1,000 times, get up 1,001 times. Try it again, do it again. Learn how to move the mountain that seems impossible with faith alone. And this is something I learned in the practice. So it took me a year to do a headstand.

40:44 It took me two years to do a forearm balance. Five years to do a handstand. 15 years to do other poses. Think about this. What is your dream?

40:51 How long are you going to work at it when the world tells you no? When everything says you failed, that didn’t work out. You failed at that. That didn’t work out. You failed at that too.

41:00 That didn’t work out. It’s been 10 years. You’ve been trying to live your dream. Are you going to quit today? Are you going to keep believing?

41:07 If your dream takes you five years, 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, are you going to stay the course? Keynote, you have to be stronger. How strong do you need to be? As big and bold as your dreams are. And he said that to you?

41:21 Or that’s your part? No, all he said was Keynote, you have to be stronger. And didn’t, he was, do you think he knew he was teaching you that it wasn’t just physically stronger? He would have to have known on some intuitive level, you know, because there were other people that were basically doing worse than I was and didn’t get told to be stronger. And so that was also something that was kind of this Zen riddle about practicing with him.

41:45 You know, someone would be doing one pose and from the outside, it looked slightly disastrous. And Grigee would walk up and say, oh, good. And you would think, hmm, what’s good about that? Then he would look at you and you would think again from the outside, all of like the Olympic, you know, marks of like the alignment is good here and the shoulder is good and the this is an alignment and all that. And he would come up to you and say, oh, bad, you know, and you’re thinking, well, what’s bad?

42:08 You know, and so it was never this kind of cookie cutter approach. It was really about meeting the person where they were and giving them exactly what it is that that person needed to grow. Well, it sounds fascinating. And you obviously got this stronger message because you seem pretty strong now. Yeah, I mean, it’s still something I think about every day.

42:26 I mean, I like to think that I’m stronger now, but there’s still dreams. You know, it’s still things that I face, you know, and honestly, since the time I look back and I can realize this and it’s come about in the last couple of years that I’ve realized the pattern in my life that I can trace back. So the time I’m about nine years old is that I’ve suffered through periods of cyclical depression. And during these periods of depression, I wanted to quit on me, on life.

42:48 And so I still wake up some mornings and feel like I want to quit. You know, I know what to do with it now, but it’s not like it’s gone. You know, I still wake up some mornings and I think, man, is anybody listening? Does it matter? And then you go back to the practice.

43:03 And I go back to the practice. I go back to faith. I go back to belief. I go back to the foundation of the spiritual journey and I keep going. Okay.

43:12 How long did you spend with Guruji? About 10 years. Okay, that’s a long time. Yeah. There or back and forth?

43:19 Back and forth. Okay. You know, so my first trip was two months. My second trip was six months in India. My third trip was six months in India.

43:26 So I sort of, you know, uprooted my life and spent a lot of time in India and kind of just went back and forth between traveling, living abroad, and sometimes going back home to see my parents and then being in India. I found out very quickly that if I didn’t have an apartment, I could very easily save a lot of money, which could get me a long ways in India. So I sort of moved back in with my parents after graduate school and just said, you know, mom, I’ll be here for a little bit.

43:50 I’m an only child. My parents were pretty happy to have me back. And I practiced in their garage, you know, backed out their car and practiced in the garage and taught yoga classes and saved all my money and went back to India. Wow. And this is 10, 15 years ago.

44:05 This is about 15, 17 years ago. Okay. Before Instagram, before yoga became popular. Yeah, before YouTube. Before YouTube.

44:11 Oh my gosh. Not before YouTube. Say it ain’t so. Wow. Okay, so, and just so people know, you were learning ashtanga yoga from Guruji.

44:22 Can you give us like quickly a brief history of even yoga and like why ashtanga as opposed to another practice from people that just don’t know because I’m guessing you know this stuff. Yeah, oh, I mean, I’m not, you know, yoga or Sanskrit historian, but I’ll give you the best sound bite that’s possible. So yoga is an ancient spiritual practice that’s grounded in the inner search, right? And yoga as a spiritual path is really as old as humanity itself. And it can be traced back to the time of the Rishis, which is the time of the Vedas over 5,000 years ago in India’s historic past.

44:57 The yoga tradition was always meant to be, again, part of a spiritual journey that was meant to be taught in what’s called Guru Parampara, which is direct transmission from the teacher to the student. So it’s never something to be done kind of on your own. Always have a teacher. Who is the original teacher? God is the original teacher.

45:12 And this is the idea that the yoga practice itself is a gift of grace. It’s a gift of knowledge. And this is a sacred spiritual practice. Now, yoga then gets passed on in various shapes and forms and different traditions. And there’s this concept of asana.

45:29 And asana is the physical practice, which is a foundation to create health and healing in the body, and also to create stillness in the body. Now, we have the sort of codification of a systematic approach to asana, documented about 500 years ago in a text that’s called the hatha yagaparipika. Hatha yagaparipika is beginning to talk about and describe in detail how asana itself, the yoga poses, actually begin to create energetic shifts and spiritual awakenings in the body.

45:59 And then this kind of continues in different lineages and different practices into our current day experience of yoga. The most important thing to find in yoga is to have a practice that has a lineage. Not just a charismatic and beautiful teacher, but a lineage. Because if you have a teacher who’s not a student, the question becomes, you know, just, I would say it becomes questionable about how much yoga, in a traditional sense, that person is doing. Not to say that they can’t be an amazing teacher and an amazing spiritual voice, but it’s the question of, if you’re gonna be practicing yoga, look to see, has your teacher been a student?

46:35 Have they gone on a transformation? Do they continue to practice themselves? Because this is really, really important when we begin to kind of loop ourselves into a style of yoga. Whether it’s ashtanga yoga, or any of the spiritual lineages that are available in yoga, the poses themselves, I think, are secondary to, or the order of poses are really secondary to the notion of a spiritual lineage. Okay, and other styles of yoga we would have heard of are?

47:02 Well, there’s another style of yoga called the shivananda style of yoga, and this is a really respectable style of yoga, one that was actually my very first class, and this is what’s called a traditional hatha yoga practice that has a lot of discussion of the spiritual benefits of the practice, and it’s a little bit more low-key than, say, the ashtanga practice. The ashtanga yoga itself comes from what’s called the lineage of Krishna Macharya. So this is another Indian teacher, and so Krishna Macharya is sort of understood to be our teacher’s teacher, so this was my teacher’s teacher, and he taught a group, so it’s almost like drawing a family tree, and so he taught many students, but there are probably a handful, maybe 10 students of his, that have created sort of styles of yoga, not even created, but had styles of yoga named after them.

47:49 Another really famous one is BKS Iyengar. We’ve heard about Iyengar yoga, which is very focused on alignment and therapeutics, and this also comes from the lineage of Krishna Macharya, same as ashtanga yoga. So in other words, lineage-based yoga is more important, so find one that works for you within the context of the greater kind of world of yoga. Okay, any other main lineages people would have heard of? Well, let’s see.

48:18 There are many different styles of yoga, and some of these styles of yoga are, you could say, named after other people. There’s Vinayoga, which is based in what’s called vinyasa. When people talk about vinyasa as a lineage or as a style of yoga, this is still considered to be within the lineage of Krishna Macharya. The word vinyasa is meant to be coordination of breath to movement, and it comes from the ritualization of our movement and our breath, and comes from ancient Vedic rituals, where breath, movement, and mantra was meant to be orchestrated in a very particular way to consecrate the space of the ritual.

49:01 And in the yoga practice, we consecrate the space of the inner world. There are many styles of yoga, but the key is to figure out, does this teacher have a teacher? What lineage are they a part of? Have they studied in the Iyengar tradition, have they studied in the Sivananda tradition? I think there’s another one that has another style of yoga that I’ve never taken a class in, but I’ve met people who’ve practiced and they seem really, really nice.

49:26 It’s called the Kundalini tradition, and I don’t really know much about that, but I’ve met people who practice that and get great benefits from it. Breath work is big in Kundalini. Yes, I think so. And where does the Bikram style fall into those? I’ve never tried Bikram, so I’m totally ignorant about the Bikram style.

49:46 I live in Miami, I’m born in Miami, and I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Miami, but Miami is known to be hot and humid, right? So the idea of turning on a heater and putting myself in a heated room in Miami seemed to be about the least attractive thing on my list of things to do. Pretty much all you have to do to feel like you are blowing up from the inside in Miami is just close the windows and turn the air conditioning off, and then very quickly you’ll see the thermometer just rise and rise and rise and rise.

50:13 It’ll quickly get over 100 degrees. I don’t know what they heat Bikram too, I’ve never tried it, but I’ve just never tried it because of that. Miami’s really hot. Maybe if I lived in Canada or maybe in the UK and I was cold in the winter, I would feel like I wanted to try it. One thing that I can say is that many, many people practice it, and it seems to bring a lot of people into the practice, and I’m for anything and everything that brings people into the practice.

50:37 Okay, but also there’s no lineage there, not a lot of learning if I have to read into what you’re saying. I’ve never researched where Bikram came from, so for all I know he may have had a guru at some moment, so I genuinely don’t know. Okay, and like you said, any practice is better than no practice. Any practice is better than no practice, and I kind of feel like if you are meant to do this practice and you walk into any yoga class, whether it’s a Bikram class or a hot yoga class or an Ashtanga class or a gentle class in the gym or something like that, is there something in you that yoga speaks to?

51:11 It’s the student’s responsibility to seek out higher level instruction and kind of continue their own spiritual practice. Okay, very good, and why Ashtanga for you? I think I’ve heard you say that you like it because it forces you to focus on your weaknesses and be present with things you’re not good at. Is that something that’s kind of inherent to the Ashtanga practice? So the Ashtanga practice has something really unique to it in that it asks those who are flexible to become strong and those who are strong to become flexible.

51:42 And all of the places where you are weak and all of the places where you are stiff will be brought to the surface. So it literally asks you to go in and dig around all in your stuff. All of the things that you would rather kind of not face, Ashtanga makes you face them or asks you to face them. It creates a safe space where it’s finally okay to go in and sort of make peace with all those shadows and make peace with all that darkness inside of you. But why Ashtanga is interesting for me, I mean, because I didn’t research Ashtanga when I started, so I’m advising people to research and I didn’t research, you know, which I, you know, not to say it was a time thing, but to be honest with you, I walked into Ashtanga Yoga Primary Series because it worked with my schedule and I just started doing it.

52:22 I started doing what’s called the traditional Mysore style practice, which is named after the city where my teacher, Shri Kipa Tavijoy, lived and taught. And then I started researching it and then I started, you know, and then I jumped in, but I guess I’m kind of like a jump in kind of person. So this is what I mean by this up to the student. So you have a student and they jump into a style of yoga and then if they find out at some moment that style of yoga is not in integrity, then it’s up to the student not to give up on yoga, but to continue their journey.

52:47 Right. And it looks like you stumbled upon the one that’s just right for your personality, your needs, you know, and how you needed to develop emotionally, spiritually. It was a divine orchestration, absolutely. It’s bring me into that class. What was it like when Guruji passed?

53:05 I mean, it was heartbreaking. The day that he passed away, it was awful because I had a dream. And in the dream, I was in his room, like I was in his bedroom and this was just a dream, you know, I was like up here looking down on the room and I saw him and I saw his daughter next to him and I saw his grandson, I saw his son, I saw them all around him and I saw his spirit leave his body in the dream. And I remember in the dream saying to myself, he’s lost his legs now.

53:34 Like the spirit’s gone from his legs, he’s lost his breath, Guruji’s passed, he’s gone, Guruji’s gone. And I woke up from the dream like crying, like hysterically crying and I was just like, Guruji’s gone, he’s gone. And then I went online, I looked on the website, I looked around, nothing, nobody posted anything. And I posted something on like Facebook or Twitter or something and I said I had a dream that Guruji died so relieved to wake up and find that it wasn’t true.

54:01 And then a friend of mine knocked on my door and I just like carried on with my life because I was like, oh, he’s okay, I just had a bad dream. A friend of mine knocked on my door like an hour later and he knocked on the door and he said, your dream is true, Guruji’s passed away and I just started crying and it was, I felt so lost after he passed away because I felt like, you know, I just felt like no matter what was going on in my life, I could always go back to India and I could be with Guruji. And so no matter how crazy life was, no matter how dark I went into a period of depression or no matter how like wacky things were, I felt like I can always go spend time with Guruji and it’ll be okay.

54:36 I’ll go back to my store and it’ll be okay. Like, he’ll be there and I’ll be okay there. And that was suddenly gone. I was like, where am I okay now? Like, where’s, you know, where is he now?

54:48 Like, where’s my okay place? You know, and I just felt like the foundation, the utter that had steered my life was just suddenly pulled out from under me and I was just like, well, I don’t really want to turn his grandson into like my guru like that. I’d love him, I’d love his grandson. I could throw my yoga teacher, Sharad, but I felt like Guruji was such a guru. He was this embodiment of like the spiritual lineage and I just, I didn’t want to try to go out and search for another one.

55:19 And so for many, many years, I felt lost. And- Is this his final lesson of trying to teach you to grow stronger? Maybe, you know, and then I think what happened for me was there was some moment, you know, I think there was a spiral. And the spiral ended up with me going into a period of very, very dark depression and relapsing into a bunch of behaviors that I thought I’d out, I thought I’d grown out of and left behind. And they were all sort of right back up to the surface and in such an overwhelming and devastating way.

55:52 And there were three things that kind of led me out of it. And I remember kind of like the rock bottom of it is that my husband suggested, you know, I go talk to a therapist and I mean, we’d gone with therapist, I’ve gone with therapist sometimes. And he had said, you know, I think you should go talk to your therapist. And I did. And then she said to me at the end of the session, you know, on a scale of one to 10 depression, I rate you as a 10 and I consider you to be at risk of dangering yourself.

56:17 So I suggest, you know, I’m gonna write your prescription for psychopharmaceuticals and I suggest you consider like checking yourself into a treatment facility. And I was like, I am a yogi. Like, I do not take psychopharmaceutical, you know? What year was this? This was probably maybe this was like four years ago, something like that.

56:35 What does rock bottom look like? Rock bottom looked for me like every day I woke up and I wanted my life to end. I woke up with suicidal ideation every day. I woke up and I just, I can’t. And I looked around and I just saw suffering everywhere.

56:50 Suffering in my body, in the people around me. Everything was suffering. And it was this thing of, I felt trapped in my life. And it was like, okay, so here’s this thing from the outside. Someone could say success was successful.

57:01 But all I could see was how much it cost me in all these other ways. Here’s all the pain that that caused. Here’s the friend that I no longer have because I decided to go for that. And here’s the pain. Here’s the way my husband is still mad at me because of that.

57:15 And here’s the time I didn’t get to spend with my parents because of that. And here’s the life I didn’t live because I chose that one. And I’m happy with that, but look at all this, look at what it cost me. And everything I looked at was like that. I would look at our car and then I wouldn’t see like, hey, we have a nice car.

57:29 I would see like, oh, this was the struggle we went to to get into that. Oh, and here’s this house that we wanted and we bought and we built and we renovated. And here’s the argument we had about the blinds there. And here’s the time that this, and I just saw all the pain and I felt so trapped by it. And then I started to engage in behaviors that I hadn’t done since I was 20 again, which I had an eating disorder when I was younger and I started to go into that again.

57:57 So I started to throw up again. And it was just, it was just awful. I didn’t know how to stop. And I was like, this is crazy. And I stopped meditating.

58:06 I had done meditation retreats and I just stopped meditating. I just stopped. I kept doing yoga, which was interesting. So I kept doing the poses, but I couldn’t sit there. And I would cry all the time and I would wake up every day and I would plan different means for my life to end.

58:22 And I would just sit there in what felt like the shattered glass of a broken heart just every day. And I kept going, I mean, from the outside, I don’t think many people would have known. I think my husband saw it and I could hardly talk to him because every time I talked to him, I couldn’t see him anymore. I just saw every fight that we had and every way that I’d hurt him and every way that I was really sorry, but I don’t know if he’ll ever forgive me. And just saw that and I felt like I could get out.

58:47 And this all came from the passing of Guruji. I can look back and I can kind of see like, hey, that was the beginning because I had this place that I could always go and be safe. So I had no more safe. And then I just started to spin and then that spin built a momentum and that momentum led me to take one bad decision after another. And even though I kept going back to India and practicing here and there, there was just this momentum that was spinning and it just left unchecked.

59:13 It led me into the same black vortex, this abyss that I had experienced before, but I never thought I’d go back and it was kind of darker than it was. How did you proceed from there? Well, there were three things that I did. The first, and this is something that I believe everyone can benefit from. I started meditating again, just five minutes a day.

59:36 And this is the thing that I really believe everyone can meditate. I think everyone should meditate because if you don’t know what’s going on in your mind, I kind of feel like then the mind is that the untrained mind is your biggest enemy. It can be your hero, but if it’s untrained, you don’t know how you’re thinking, what your quality of your thoughts are. It’s your greatest adversary. It can be the biggest bully out there.

59:58 Absolutely. And so I started sitting for five minutes a day and I made a commitment. I’m gonna sit for five minutes a day, no matter what. No matter how scary it is, no matter if I sit there and cry for five minutes, I will start again from today. And then I just started and it was overwhelming because I had given it up and I used to have a meditation practice where I would sit for an hour, up to an hour every day and then I just wasn’t doing it.

1:00:23 And just to start with the humble task just five minutes, just five minutes. So I started there, so that was one. The second thing I did was I started to do cognitive behavioral therapy or dialectical behavioral therapy, which is a different type of therapy. And this was really helpful because I felt it was applied mindfulness. And so it helped me both identify the triggers.

1:00:41 So I could feel the triggers before, like I could feel the things of that’s coming in and then now my cycle of panic. And I started, in addition to kind of having this dark depression, I also started to get panic attacks and panic attacks that would lead me into a fits of self-directed violence. And it was deeply disturbing. And this is probably why my therapist, I think you’re a danger to yourself right now. Okay, self-directed, like beating yourself up and punching walls.

1:01:08 Yeah, I just wanted to cut myself. And I was just wanting, generally having the feeling of wanting to just like destroy everything. Like literally everything, like burn the house down. Just like burn it all down. It’s kind of crazy, right?

1:01:24 And I was living in that world. And so when I started to do the Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, there were so many things that came up in that process. The first were, again, what I see is applied mindfulness. So you feel the trigger, I felt the trigger, but I know what to do with it. Okay, so you feel the trigger.

1:01:39 So here’s what you do. Here are some things, which the yoga sutra is saying this is in Sanskrit, vitarka badhane pratipakshabhavanam. When you have an annoying thought, think of something other instead. But I don’t know what other thought to think of. Well, DBT is really interesting because it says, here’s a trigger as soon as you’ve identified it.

1:01:54 Here are 10 things that you can do. You don’t have to solve it. You just need to stop the trigger, right? So there’s a couple of things that really worked for me were ice, I hate cold. So when a trigger came up, like a panic attack started to come, get an ice pack or stick your head in the freezer.

1:02:11 So this was one that seemed to work for me. Another one is to say and try to recite some meaningless thing from memory, which if you know all of the states and their capitals, you can do that or count to 10 or do multiplication tables, just some meaningless mindful activity that we’ll do for enough period of time, usually about 20 minutes, that we’ll just take your mind off of the trigger. You can do your meditation practice if you have a meditation practice.

1:02:35 Bring your mind back to the breath. That’s a high level of it because bring the mind back to the breath unless you have a meditation practice, it’s overwhelming. So there’s a whole lot of these that begin to really take root for me. And then I started to identify, oh, here are my triggers. And this is what it’s about.

1:02:50 And I even went all the way back into a period of my life when I was around 11, when I started to realize I had a lot of unprocessed emotions around my first sexual experiences. And that kind of came up in relation to this. And I realized that a lot of this state of mind of both panic, depression, and the inability to process anger was really related to things that happened to me when I was too young to really understand. So dialectical behavioral therapy. So meditation, dialectical behavioral therapy, which is like applied mindfulness.

1:03:21 And then the third thing for me was I really found and developed a deep and personal relationship with God. So I found a new foundation, a foundation in faith, a foundation that I don’t need to be in India to find. I don’t need to be any, I need to be only within to find. And so for me, that really changed everything. Okay, was that a specific religion?

1:03:42 Well, the first thing to really understand about me is I wasn’t raised with any religion. My parents raised me with no religion. My grandfather’s Japanese, and it’s a huge Buddhist. My mom considers herself recovering Catholic, which means she went to Catholic school and then has spent the rest of her life trying to recover from that. My dad grew up in Ohio, which is very Christian and Presbyterian.

1:04:05 But as soon as, I don’t know, he left that behind. When he graduated from college, he came down to Florida and then go back to Ohio for about 30 years. And I guess also left the church behind. And so my parents raised me with no religion. And so I always checked the other box in religion when I was growing up.

1:04:24 It says Christian and Buddhist, and I checked other. I don’t really, we’re non-specified. And I also had this kind of angst about the word God. It used to make me really mad because I felt like everything that’s, historically, if we look at what’s been done in the name of God, it’s the most heinous and hurtful things. And it’s still going on today, the misappropriation of the name of God for actions that are hurtful and misogynistic and discriminatory and violent and things that if we look at, if we think, wait a minute, who is God if he sanctioned all that?

1:05:00 It made me really mad for a while. And so I thought, I never actually went so far to say I don’t believe in God, but I would always use these kind of long and convoluted phrases like, I believe in the love of the universe. I believe in the vibrating oneness from which we’ve all come. And so I’ve used these like long kind of new agey explanations for the presence of eternality where all is one and all is good and the basic goodness and principle of love, which every sentient being is divinely gifted in and the eternal divine.

1:05:30 I mean, it was just, you know. You’re good at this. Yeah, I practiced a lot. The yoga speak. No, yeah, and then, again, my yoga teacher, do your practice, think about God.

1:05:39 Five years, seven years in, I’m thinking, I think like he means this, you know? And so, at some moment, I started to really think about who is God, what is God, where is this? You know, who’s God? I read the Yogastrutras. The Yogastrutras talk a lot about God and talk about what it means to surrender to God.

1:05:55 And I remember one moment when I was teaching, and this was in a period where I was so devastated. When I went and started, I was still, like I was climbing back out of the hole, but I hadn’t made much headway. And I remember when I would sit every day, I tuned into my heart and I just felt shattered glass. And I just felt this shattered glass in my heart. And then I remember I was teaching, it was in Thailand, and I was teaching, and then I walked out into the class, and it was very early in the morning, and there was this fog that had come into the room.

1:06:26 And I had this overwhelming feeling of peace and this feeling of timelessness, as though it could be a thousand years in the past and a thousand years in the future, and that they were all happening now. And there was compassion and love and deep wisdom. And I just almost didn’t wanna move. And then it sort of hit me. Oh, this is the present, God is here.

1:06:46 Oh, this is God. He’s here now, okay. And so I started to kind of open up my mind to the presence of God. And what happened for me then was I would have these moments of immense sort of oneness, and then I would have these moments where I was back in the hole and clawing my way out. And then I would have these moments of, you know, these moments of indescribable peace.

1:07:09 And sometimes also rapture, sort of divine rapture. And then I would back in the hole climbing out, you know? And then it would be this sort of one or the other. And these were really transcendental experiences. And then this is gonna sound completely crazy, but I travel and teach, travel all over the world.

1:07:24 And one weekend I was on the way to teach in Dallas and I’d normally give myself permission on airplanes to watch a little bit of trashy TV. So I opened up my iPad and I was about to watch, you know, one of these kind of, you know, corny American sitcoms. And then I opened up my iPad and as I’m opening up the iPad, literally about to watch TV, I have this open vision. So I’m there, I open up the iPad. I’m here, I don’t think I actually opened, I think I just flipped it and didn’t turn it on.

1:07:51 And then I, and then like, I’m guessing my eyes are closed, but I see all of this. There’s light, so I see this light. And then I see clouds as though the heavens descend. And this isn’t my iconography, I’m not raised with any of this. And then I see these like clouds of heaven and this light that shines through and then the clouds open.

1:08:14 And then literally descending from heaven, standing in front of me is Jesus Christ. Wow, in the plane. In the plane. So he’s in the plane. I mean, I’m not in the plane anymore.

1:08:23 I’m in this like field of light vision. I’m in this open vision and he’s standing there. And I had the same experience when I met Guruji for the first time. Fear, you know, oh my God, what am I gonna do? You know, and in my first thought was, what are you doing here?

1:08:37 I’m this yoga girl. Like, where’s the Buddha? Where’s Ganesh? Like, where’s all, like, where’s all this? Like, I’m this yoga girl.

1:08:43 Like, I’m not one of your crazy people that goes around and does all this crazy stuff. Like, who are you? And so that was my first response. But then my heart, just like Guruji, recognized the Guru in him. Something in my heart just slept up and said yes.

1:08:59 And then I felt his hands on my head like this. And then I felt this wind rush through my body. And I felt love. True and complete and total love. Just like a blanket of love, a blanket of peace, a blanket of all wisdom throughout all time.

1:09:15 And I realized now, like at that moment, I was like, Jesus is my Guru now. I’m good. Like, I have a rocking Guru. Yeah, most people would kill for an experience like that. And that was a couple years ago.

1:09:27 Yeah. Okay, so now you are. Like two and a half years ago, something like that. Okay, which makes you Christian now? I consider myself Christian, but I don’t like that word.

1:09:35 I feel like we need a new, I feel like the whole world of Christianity needs like an upgrade, update. Like we need Christianity 2.0. You know what I mean? Yeah, kind of. And I feel like we need, like there’s so many different, like all these different Christians and nominations and all these things.

1:09:49 And I feel like, how do I, like I feel like I’m a disciple of Christ. Jesus Christ is my Guru. Jesus is my Guru, you know? Does that make me Christian? Yes, do I go to church?

1:09:57 No, I don’t have a church. I don’t even know if I, like, do you need to go to church? If you find one that connects with you? I personally haven’t really. And I feel like God is universal.

1:10:12 And there’s this, so I’d never read the Bible. That’s another thing that’s kind of crazy. Jesus saying, I’ve never read the Bible. I’ve read like the Dhammapada. I’ve read all of these like traditional Sanskrit texts.

1:10:23 I’ve read a lot of Buddhist books. I’ve read a lot of the Upanishads. I’ve studied all of this Eastern mysticism and I’ve never read the Bible. Okay, and you’re going to. No, there’s no plans right now.

1:10:33 Well, no, after, I had this experience after this vision where I was thinking about it and I thought, this is sort of the way my mind works. So I was like, you were kind of cool, like Jesus, like you were awesome. I guess I’ll read your book. Okay, right, okay, very nice. So these three practices kind of got you where four years later to where you are now, which I’m guessing is much stronger.

1:10:57 Absolutely. Yeah, it’s not like those thoughts don’t come up. So it’s not like those thoughts of quitting don’t come up. But I feel like I finally understand what it means to have faith. I finally understand what it means to surrender, to really get it.

1:11:10 Like, hey, it’s not all on my shoulders, what’s going on. If it’s not meant to be, it’s not part of the divine plan. No amount of me forcing or fighting it is going to make it be there. And I really understand like I am not this like giant actor who’s making all this stuff happen. Yeah, I got to show up and do my work, but it’s really grace.

1:11:28 It’s divine grace. It’s not me, it’s not like me with my small ego out there forcing everyone to bend according to my will. You know, I’m not, you know, seriously, I’m Game of Thrones, I’m just me. And I show up and I do the best that I can, but the grand picture, it’s not on my shoulders. Right, you’re feeling like you’re channeling this grace.

1:11:49 You’re on this kind of- Yeah, I’m receptive to it. Right, okay. You know, it’s interesting earlier, we were talking about the whole concept of a suit. And like in America, it’s like, the suit means you have to comply to something else. And I was talking about the idea of taking the suit back for what it was originally.

1:12:04 And it’s something of self-expression. I choose to wear the suit because it’s very important to have a conversation with you. And I want to show you that it’s important and I want to show you that it’s mine. And I feel like in a weird way, like God was kind of taken away from us. And it’s like, oh, it’s sold back to us on these terms.

1:12:18 Well, you have to be this denomination, which fights this denomination, which fights with this denomination. So you grow up with this, I’m not religious point of view. I grew up the same way. And I feel like what you’re doing is kind of like taking God back on your terms. I’m going to take this on my terms and choose what I want to channel and I want to believe.

1:12:38 And I don’t have to associate myself with your way of doing this, or I have to be called this thing, or I have to fight with your way. So I think it’s powerful you’re using that word. Because again, I’ve met a lot of people in the spiritual area and they don’t want to use the three-letter word because again, it brings up all this baggage. And it does even in me and used to be you, but it doesn’t have to. No, and I think one of the things that was really sort of personal and transformative for me is to, and this is where yoga comes in because yoga is an experiential practice.

1:13:09 How do you know yoga works? Because you practice and you feel it in your body, right? So the whole notion of knowledge and yoga is that truth which you’ve experienced to be true is the truth you believe in, right? How can you know God because someone told you God exists and he’s there and he’s like that. And then there’s all these flawed human beings that are acting in ways that you don’t want to be anything like them.

1:13:28 But hey, what if you could experience God? What if you could experience God beyond the name G-O-D? What if you could experience total and complete unconditional love? What if you could experience a presence that would wrap around you like an enveloping blanket and let you know that you are here for a unique purpose and that you matter and that you’ve been created perfectly and that no matter how hard you try to screw it up, you will always be loved and cherished and you are precious and valuable.

1:13:59 And if you could feel that, right? How transformative would that be? And to know that that’s available for every human being is amazing. And that can be available more readily through a practice. I totally believe it because you know, you attune yourself to be inwardly sensitive.

1:14:17 You attune yourself to experiencing things that sometimes don’t make sense, right? I don’t want a forward bend but my teacher says I should. Okay, now I forward bend, now I feel better. So then that’s the physical. But then when the senses are directed to the inner body, when the heart cracks open a little bit and then you’re soft and you’re subtle and receptive, then I believe it’s possible to open yourself up to these experiences of the deepest and most eternal truth.

1:14:41 Okay, amen to that. Talk to me about the Keno McGregor brand. Are you the most famous yogi out there? No, I don’t think so actually. I think you might be.

1:14:51 No. You got over a million Instagram followers. Who can even top that? I think there might be a one or two people who are just on the same level with that. I asked this to a few people recently and I’m like, is she, is she?

1:15:02 And who do you know that might be bigger than her? Well, I have a really good friend of mine named Carrie Verna and she’s Beach Yoga Girl on Instagram. And so we are kind of partners in crime and a lot of stuff. And she also has a million followers on Instagram. Okay, so maybe a partner in crime there.

1:15:18 You talked about being stronger, being stronger, being stronger. And the Guruji is telling you this. And you made allusions to things that you’ve had to fight over the last four years, probably six years, 10 years. People probably look at you and say, oh, it’s only the last few years that you’ve been big, but you’ve been working at this for quite some time. And let’s throw out some of the things that they say about you that traditional yoga people should not be public on Instagram, should not turn it into a business, should not wear the short shorts and do the poses.

1:15:50 You’ve heard it all. What do you say to these things? And what do you say to people that are hearing this now for the first time to me? And they’re like, oh, I didn’t know about that. Because you’ve heard all of this the last few years.

1:16:02 And how did you process that? First of all, don’t waste time trying to please the peanut gallery. Please yourself, right? Check in with yourself. Have an inner check-in that you’re gonna look into every day and answer to your own integrity.

1:16:16 And you know when you’re in your own integrity and you know when you’re doing something for show and if you wanna do something for show, do it consciously and own it and admit it and say, you know what, I did this for show in flash and I wanna get attention. Own it. Something’s no problem with it. I think honesty and transparency and being very comfortable with who you are and the choices you’ve made is really important. So for anyone that doesn’t wanna wear small shorts, don’t wear them.

1:16:37 For anyone that doesn’t wanna put their yoga practice on Instagram, don’t. For anyone that does, do. It’s pretty much as simple as that. All right, amen to that. What about building a business around yoga?

1:16:49 And look, I’m just guessing, but I’m guessing maybe traditional yogis, some might look at that and say, that’s the opposite of yoga or that’s the Western capitalism coming in. Only making money. Yeah, what do you say to that? It’s a really good question. First, my yoga teacher always talked about that no one could own yoga.

1:17:10 So the idea of saying these poses are mine, I invented them and to kind of keep them in, you know, to try to copyright a series or to copyright this and to say, well, this is mine and mine only. And you could only use it if I say so. Guruji always said, you know, no one owns yoga. Yoga is universal. So that’s, I think, very important.

1:17:28 At the same time, Guruji always charged for classes. You know, it wasn’t free. And I think this is important because the idea is that I’m a householder, which is there are different levels of yoga practitioners. And when you’re a householder, you maintain a household, which means you have a job and you earn money and, you know, you make an exchange. If you’re a sadhu or renunciates and you take a sannyas path or you, you know, take a path to be like a monk or something like that, then you live off of the alms of others and then you’re not making money.

1:17:56 And then this is just, you know, you’re just a monk and it’s a different path. I’m a householder. So I have a business mind, I enjoy making business. And I’m very clear about, you know, this is a business venture. And I believe that it’s possible to run a successful business that’s in alignment with yoga values, which is the idea of not taking advantage of anyone and to being very, very truthful.

1:18:15 And I believe actually that, you know, we’re yogis and we’re in the world, so we have to buy a grocery somewhere. We need clothes, we have to buy clothes. You know, we need various, you know, accessories like toothpaste, for example, and body wash and all these sorts of things. And, you know, we need, we exist and maybe we need a mode of transportation, whether it’s shoes for walking or bicycle or cars, we need these things. So there exists in a world where we are going to need things, right?

1:18:43 So how can we make those things exist within the world of yoga and be in alignment with yogic values? And I kind of feel like this is a way that if yogis start businesses and run the business, not with profitability, yes, it must be profitable, but to have the goal be to do good in the world, to have the goal be to make a difference, to say, you know what, this is not just a pair of shoes, but this is recycled plastic bottles that is going to decrease from the landfill and be carbon neutral. And then to have that be a product, I think is really awesome.

1:19:13 I mean, I don’t have a pair of shoes that I’m selling, but I think something like that would be really awesome. And I like to think there’s an element of something like that in everything that I do. So it’s not the goal of anything that I do, whether it’s writing a book or making online videos or opening a yoga center with my husband, the goal is never financial. It’s always about how many people can I affect? Who can I make contact with?

1:19:35 And how can this help someone, you know, real in the world? And yet some people from Mysore and India don’t understand that. And how do you have those conversations with them? Well, I have had a lot of these people, I will say that to the people who have come up to me and asked me directly, I respect immensely. And I’ve had conversations with many people that I’ve talked to directly.

1:19:59 And they said, you know, how do you make peace with that? Like, how are you taking selfies all the time? And they ask me these questions and I talk to them and I say, you know what, it’s, I like it. It’s as simple as that. I like to take a picture of myself and post it online.

1:20:11 It’s as simple as that. If you don’t like it, don’t do it. And then that we talk and we sort of find each other and we find this sort of mutual acceptance of sort of where we are and this mutual respect for one another. And I think it’s that human to human contact. All the people that say it’s my face, I respect immensely.

1:20:25 Everyone who says it behind my back, I forgive. Because, hey, you know, we’ve all gossiped at some moment in our life. And I just, you know, we’re all not above it. So the only thing you can do is forgiveness. And to everyone who’s been mad at me and had the courage to come and speak it to me and now we’re friends, rather than just giving me the feedback and moving on and now we’re friends and we found each other, I love every single one of those people because, hey, we’ve gone through the stuff together and we’re good.

1:20:53 We understand each other. We love each other. We respect each other’s differences. So you forgive a lot of people and a lot of continents is what you’re trying to say. It’s interesting because I could see how this traditional, and I’m just making guesses, about how people view themselves and the yogic tradition, probably people who were never trained, who just assume that yogis behave a certain way, which is kind of judge these things.

1:21:16 And yet maybe even be a little hypocritical in themselves. But like you said, you do have to make a living. These people made livings. And, you know, you just decide to make your choices. But I guess you’re dealing with a lot of this he said, she said stuff that comes from like this collective assumption of what a yogi should be.

1:21:32 And you’re kind of battling against that sometimes. Yeah, well, there’s assumptions about what everyone should be. And so it’s these ideas of, is it some people ask me, even being female, like, is it okay for you as a woman to travel by yourself? You know, I’m like, I’m fine. Is it okay that you’re wearing small shorts and doing your yoga practice?

1:21:52 And I’m like, it’s really hot in Miami. Come practice in Miami. See if you keep your thick leggings on. You wear makeup. Like, is that okay for a yogi?

1:22:01 And I’m like, listen, when I started to practice, I shaved my head, okay? I got rid of all my makeup. I gave away all my clothes. I gave away all my possessions. I lived like, you know, only organic cotton.

1:22:11 I ate only raw, vegan, organic food. And I lived like that, you know? And at some moment I was like, I took this on like a person, like I took it on like I was an actor in the play of life. You know, I’m a yogi and I’m wearing this sort of holier than thou. And I don’t eat that.

1:22:26 And I won’t do that. And no, I don’t put a blow dryer on my hair. I’m just exactly natural. And so I lived like that for a little bit. And then I was like, you know what?

1:22:34 I kind of mess lipstick. And you know what? I’m kind of a girly girl. I kind of like to go shopping. And you know what?

1:22:40 Like, I kind of like, you know, just to, I like beautiful things. And let me see if I can do this in a way that’s still in accordance with yogic values. And so I just sort of gave myself permission to be myself. And thank God you did. Where are we going in the future?

1:22:56 I mean, we started off this conversation and you say, well, it feels like the world is coming to this critical mass of realizing something’s wrong with our current model. And maybe this model has been in practice for a few hundred years, upwardly mobile or industrial revolution or we value money and status and all of these kinds of things. And we’re starting to understand it’s broken. And you can even argue that, you know, the media today and some of our political choices are a manifestation that some of our values are broken.

1:23:24 Where do we go from here? I mean, when I look at your Instagram feed and what you’re talking about, this is bodies moving, connecting with ourselves, valuing this discipline is really what you do. It’s this discipline practice every day. And yet I read that two thirds of my countrymen are now obese and they’re going the other way. They’re kind of into the grave, the diabetes, you know, into their phones, less moving.

1:23:50 I mean, these two worlds, they can’t coexist if you continue getting bigger. Like, where are we going? Well, I guess it’s a choice that each of us needs to make moment to moment. And I think that the choice isn’t so much about, are we going to do a discipline spiritual practice? I think it would help everyone.

1:24:08 I hope everyone really, really does. But I think the question really is human to human contact. And this is so important. What level of presence do we bring into all of our interactions? Because I feel like what’s gone on with the veneer of kind of online anonymity is a permission to hate and the permission to really just kind of unleash all of these dark places inside of ourselves.

1:24:34 And one of the things that I’m particularly concerned with with the online world is the automated functionality of the sorting of the information that we get. So in other words, everything online is sorted by algorithms. And these algorithms are created in a way to give attention to the things that make the most noise, right? So that means that if someone complains or if there’s a car crash, so we think about it like this. If we’re driving and there’s a car crash, you look.

1:25:04 If life were organized by an algorithm, then life would recognize that you wanted a car crash every day. So it would start to generate more and more car crashes for you to look at, but it would create more and more suffering, creating more and more traffic, which is not actually what you want, right? But it’s what that algorithm thinks you want because you gave your attention to it. But then you see more of it and then it just feeds you more of it and then more of it and more of it.

1:25:25 And then there’s a really interesting thing that sort of happens in that state of mind, is that when you are fed ideas that are similar to yours, you have the human brain and the human mind has the tendency to take those ideas and make them more extreme. However, when you’re fed ideas and forced to have human to human contact with people who are different than you are, you tend to begin to become more moderate in your thinking. So I think that the future must be human to human contact.

1:25:53 The future must be that we stop and we look everyone in the eye and we treat everyone as though they’re valuable. And we get rid of the idea of disposability. We get rid of the idea that this person, because they don’t have an education or money is worthless. We get rid of the idea of a hierarchy of human value and we start to really distribute value into every human being. And this could be financial, but it’s also time-wise.

1:26:20 So we look everyone in the eye and we spend time with everyone, someone in the checkout line in the grocery store, whether it’s the flight attendant, whether it’s you and me right now, and especially our friends and family when they’re hurting, when they’re mad at us, when we wanna fight back. How can we learn to be more mindful? How can we learn to soften? I feel like the future is mindfulness, really. And that that mindfulness is cultivated in a sense of mind-body presence so that your mind is fully present in your body and you’re okay with yourself so that you can be okay with others.

1:26:58 And there’s a vulnerability. I feel you have to go back to vulnerability, back to transparency, back to meeting each other once more. And it’s in that space of meeting that I think will be able to change our world. So real presence. Absolutely.

1:27:13 The practice teaches you how to be present, right? So you can’t be present with yourself. How can you be present with anyone else? If you’re exiting and escaping from your own body, are you even present with someone else? You’re looking at someone else and your mind is thinking 10 other things.

1:27:25 You’re making judgments about them and there’s all these different sort of trains going on. But I mean, think about the last time. When have you sat with someone and just sort of taken them in? And the web and mobile phone technology and all these things are gonna kill us if we go on this route. Well, the interesting thing is that you can use the technology to increase human-to-human contact, right?

1:27:51 So it’s possible to say, say I have a lot of classes online, right? So I kind of see this as a place for the world of yoga to kind of bloom in the online space. So let’s say, and this happens very often, you have someone who’s really inspired by practicing with me and they’re in Indiana. They have another person they’re really inspired by practicing with me, but they’re in Washington DC. And then they connect with each other because they watch my videos and they develop a real friendship.

1:28:17 And then that real friendship means they have someone to share yoga with. And they have someone that they feel gets them. And then they meet in person and then they develop this kind of sisterhood around yoga. And then suddenly they’re making small trips to practice with each other and maybe they go to India together one day. And so it just opens up this kind of, you know, I would almost say it like a nation within a nation, you know, a sisterhood, a brotherhood, a connection between beings and a connection between one another.

1:28:45 So that’s the good use of that. That’s the good use, yeah. And the other one is it ruining your life, buzzing constantly in your pocket and takes you out of presence when you’re hanging out with family members. And giving you permission to just sort of say all these things you would never say to someone face to face. And tolerated as well and kind of promote that culture.

1:29:02 Yeah, we just had someone in here named Douglas Rushkoff and he just said things like, every app on your phone is someone else’s business model. And, you know, not only what you said about the car crash and us wanting to look, now there’s these huge companies that know exactly what they’re doing to your brain. So they’re programming these dopamine loops in there that actually are designed to make you more agitated. And I gotta check the Facebook, but I’m not really satisfied.

1:29:24 I gotta go back again and I gotta go back again. So actually designed not to make you happy or to connect you. They’re actually designed to get you to come back and give you their attention. Because that’s what value is for them. So if you can recognize that about those apps and like, for example, all my push notifications are off, you know, and my phone goes off at night.

1:29:42 And like, if you can recognize that you should deal with it on your own terms, but you have to be careful because these things are very smart. They’re smarter than you. And they’re designed by people that are smarter than you and understand that your biology much better than you do. And yeah, you kind of see it because you have a big social media presence. You feel that kind of hate, anonymous hate more than other people.

1:30:02 But most people just see it as that thing that’s just constantly a part of their life that ultimately probably just makes them a little less connected. And a little bit more unease. Yeah. How do you deal with haters? I try not to respond at all.

1:30:15 So I just, you know, I don’t negotiate. So I leave them alone. I let them be. They have a present that they’re trying to deliver to me and I’m just not available. Do you block them?

1:30:24 I actually don’t spend time blocking because I think I’ve blocked like two people ever. I just feel like just to sit there and go in and block, it just requires energy and I’m giving it attention. So I just ignore. Okay, you can’t let your husband block them. Well, there’s haters.

1:30:39 And then the thing that sometimes kind of gets a little nutty for me is if I’m doing a live broadcast, the illicit sexual comments, that’s a little overwhelming sometimes. I try to just ignore them, but then there’s a moment where I’m like, listen. Stop that, because it’s ruining it for everyone else. Yeah. So sometimes it can get a little bit too much.

1:30:58 Okay, and then you have to call them out like on Facebook or? Oh, it’s now would be endless. No, it’s just, no, yeah, in like report block. And then even like on some of the social medias, you can’t just like click and report. It’s like, click, report, click, why, duh duh duh.

1:31:10 And I’m like, ugh. By this time, all those eggplants weren’t really worth it. Right, what can you learn from your haters? Well, I think sometimes if it bothers you, it’s probably because there’s a state of truth in it. But if it totally doesn’t bother you, if you find it just like humorous, then you know you’re resolved about it.

1:31:28 Yeah, it’s tricky. I find that it’s great if I have a layer of removal. So if I can talk to my team, and then if I’ll say, well, what are people saying? They can kind of filter out and say, well, generally we’re hearing this. And that way I don’t have to engage with this comment, that comment, that comment, which I’m a tough guy and it won’t bother me, but also it might get in there.

1:31:47 But at the same time, they’ll let me know, well, you know what? Actually, there is this feedback and it’s probably right if you’re hearing it from a variety of people and it’s feedback. And you know, it might be more right than you want to acknowledge. Absolutely, we’ve got to be open to taking in negative criticism, you know? I like to, I really like to try to be open to constructive negative criticism or even criticism that said negatively, but has some constructive benefit in it.

1:32:12 I think it can really help us grow. I don’t really believe in surrounding yourself with just, you know, fawning accolades that just, you know, give you positive feedback and tell you you’re awesome and queen of the world all the time. You really need people around you that are gonna speak the honest truth and say, hey, like, this is not working. Like, you gotta change that. Yeah.

1:32:29 Five years from now, what does Pino’s world look like? You know, what have you built? And I’m sure it’s not about what you’ve built, but what are you doing with your life? How are you getting your message out there? What are the new things?

1:32:41 Like, tell me what it looks like. Five years from now, I would like to feel that I am carrying the torch of yoga into the world in even more innovative and constructive ways. I would like to feel like it’s not only me that’s carrying the torch, but that I’ve inspired almost like an army behind me so that I’m carrying the torch, that there are thousands, millions of people who are part of that world of yoga that are carrying those torches, and that that light is just so bright that it just attracts more and more people so that there are millions of people who are practicing, who are carrying that light, who are part of the world of yoga.

1:33:26 Okay, and that happens through TV channels and books and other technology and plans of yours? Yeah, I mean, there are some ideas that are in kind of like a very infant kind of idea stage to kind of connect all the dots between these different thoughts. But I think it starts with, hey, I’ve created Om Stars, which we’re calling the world’s first yoga TV channel because we, as yogis, I have, as a yoga person, I would look online and find many things on television, just not, I wouldn’t really connect with them, and I would feel like, oh, you know, I don’t really, like this is not how I live or what I think about, and so I had this idea, yes, we want class content, and yes, we want instructional content, but I really want to create content that is like reality content, fictional content, that is really based within the world of yoga and has sort of a yogi’s mindset.

1:34:22 And so this is kind of where we see the future of the channel going is really, it’s really to be kind of Netflix for yogis so that we have, if you see anything on our channel, you’ll know that it really comes with the heart and an essence of the spiritual practice. That’s interesting. So not just a bunch of classes. Not just a bunch of classes, yeah, and we already have a series called The Global Yogi, which is kind of me seeing the world through the eyes of yoga, and so I just filmed an episode in Amsterdam and we spent the day kind of visiting all of the, it’s sort of like a yoga travel segment, so I go and I see all of the peak tourist attractions of each city and then I do some poses there and then I search for plant-based food and then I teach and so it’s just the story of seeing the world through the eyes of yoga.

1:35:03 They say you’re a very, very good teacher. Oh, that makes me happy. What makes you a good teacher? Well, I believe that what makes anyone a good teacher is the ability to see in the student what the student doesn’t see in themselves and then to just speak to that greatness, to love the student so much so that they rise up to their best potential. Okay, okay, that’s awesome.

1:35:23 Yeah, you gotta believe in your student more than they believe in themselves. Right, and you love to teach, like you travel the world and teach and teach and teach, that’s a big part of who you are. Absolutely. Okay, because you get a lot back from it as well. Absolutely, yeah.

1:35:37 Do you feel like you’re kind of repaying the debt to Guruji or honoring the tradition? Yeah, I feel like every time someone kind of gets the spark to practice and then they practice, then I definitely feel like I’m repaying the debt a little bit. Have you kind of made peace with him? Yeah, yeah, absolutely no. Okay, can I ask you some questions about like your personal daily habits and the outcome of your secrets to success?

1:36:04 Do you have a routine or something you adopted? You talked a little bit about it earlier, but something that if you practice every single day, that day has a better chance of being great. Is there certain things you do, certain times, thoughts, physical practice, et cetera?

1:36:41 When you think of the word successful, who comes to mind? Well, Guruji was successful, absolutely. I think Guruji was really, really successful. He never quit on his dreams.

1:37:00 He showed up every day to practice and he was healthy and in his body until his 90s and he was definitely a successful human being. What would we be surprised to learn about Keno? I’m kind of really into, like I read voraciously and I read everything from the Harvard Business Review to the New York Times, to novels and poetry. And so I just, I read a lot and I’m interested in a diverse body of subjects, from politics to business, to science, to the arts, and so I’m just interested in a lot of sort of things that are beyond the scope of yoga.

1:37:41 Does that help you write? Absolutely, I feel like the tool, if you wanna be a good writer, read incessantly. And what you read is gonna affect the quality of your writing. So it depends on if you’re reading a lot of blogs and you’re reading a lot of things that are written kind of in conversational colloquialisms, then your writing’s gonna sort of reflect that. But if you start to read, if you’re interested in it and you’re interested in improving your writing skills, then to read things that are slightly more educated vocabulary, I think definitely improve your writing ability.

1:38:16 And you have a master’s from NYU? Yes. And also a PhD? No, I considered doing a PhD and I was interested kind of in studying nutrition and wellness. And then I really felt like yoga was really the thing that was taking my life.

1:38:30 So I decided not to continue on that track. Okay, that makes a little sense. Yeah. And what scares you?

1:38:44 I, you know, strange men late at night, walking on the street, I don’t know. You know, well, there is that thing that they say if you ask, like if you ask the average woman, like when’s the last time you feared for your physical safety? Most women will come up with something like within the last 24 hours about like, there was this kind of strange looking person across the street and then I like, and that actually just happened to me two days ago. I was just walking down the street and there were like a large collection of kind of boisterous, you know, sort of late teenage boys.

1:39:17 And I just thought, oh, and they were kind of all had a beer in their hand. And I just actually thought like, I’m going to take another street just in case. So I do have that that comes up. They say, this is a study, like a gender study that was done. It’s most men, if you ask that, you could try it right now.

1:39:30 When’s the last time you feared for your physical safety? It’s been a while. Usually they say most men will give a talk or give an answer. Like there was that one time when I got into this fight with this guy and I thought that he was going to take me. Like they’ll have a story like that.

1:39:43 So I do have a physical thing and I know myself, like I’m not really comfortable when people like raise their voice at me. Like that still disturbs me. And I think I have some leftover stuff, some leftover triggers. So I definitely like when people actually physically like raise their voice at me, I definitely like that stimulates fear. So I definitely have a fear of that.

1:40:03 What am I afraid of personally? I guess I’m afraid of like not mattering, you know? Like no one’s listening. That I’m afraid of just not making an impact, you know? That just no one’s listening.

1:40:18 That I’ll try and try and try and try and try to reach people and try and that I won’t have anything really valuable and unique so that no one will bother listening. Okay. And if I asked what keeps you awake at night, is it that fear that maybe I won’t be able to communicate to people like in the future? Well, it keeps me awake at night is, the only times that I can’t sleep are when I have unresolved crap going on. So if I have like a business deal that like, you know, like this person hasn’t agreed and then that person, then sometimes that keeps me awake at night.

1:40:50 But actually like even that I can usually let go of because I just, you know, turn over to God. Okay, you got this, you’ve been meant to happen, let it happen, then I surrender it over. But the thing that I definitely can’t sleep is if my husband, I have an argument, I can’t sleep. I just can’t, like if we’re not good, like if we haven’t hugged and made up, I can’t sleep. So it’s for the personal stuff, you know.

1:41:13 Can you give us some relationship advice because I just met your husband and you seem very close to him and it seems like an important part of your life. No, I love him. I’m really, really grateful for him every day. I think that relationships are so meaningful, so valuable and you have to put in the work. Be willing to compromise.

1:41:31 You can’t be too rigid, you know. And take an interest in your partner’s interests, you know. So my husband loves motorcycles. So I know something about motorcycles now. Like I know that he’s into the touring bike, you know, rather than the city bike and that he was into hipster bikes.

1:41:46 So there’s just a lot of things, you know, about motorcycles and I’m sure he knows more about like various lip glosses and Instagram, for example, you know. He occasionally has to take random pictures of me. And so I think compromise, mutual respect, daily forgiveness, right? So in other words, we think about why am I in this relationship? Why am I in this relationship because I love this person.

1:42:11 Love him. Okay, so here’s this person that I love. He didn’t take out the trash today. What’s more important, right? I’m mad at you because you didn’t take out the trash or I love this person.

1:42:21 Okay, well, let me take a moment. Let me think about that. He had a really busy day and he had like five meetings and two of them were really crappy and he’s there watching Netflix. I think maybe he doesn’t need to take out the trash today. I forgive him.

1:42:32 Actually, you know what? Let me take out the trash today because I can kind of see that he needs that. And in fact, when I come back in, let me offer and see if he wants something to eat or drink or a cup of tea. Right. Constantly, like with the yogic mind, bring your mind back to the task at hand.

1:42:49 What is the task at hand? Why are you in the relationship to share love? It’s almost like you’re treating that relationship like a discipline to a certain extent. Like you have to go through that practice and embrace the hard things. Grow stronger, grow stronger.

1:43:02 Absolutely. And not go for that dopamine hit of, I remember when we first fell in love because it’s fleeting. Yeah, and then that moment gets turned into something more meaningful, that initial kind of, wow, you get to live with this person and like see them every day and share your life with them. How do you get to this handstand level that you’re at? Just as practice, nothing more.

1:43:29 Oh my gosh. I mean, I’ve been working a couple of years on just my static vertical handstand. And that’s quite challenging. To watch one of your Instagram videos from a week or two ago, where you’re doing like all sorts of different types of handstands on one hold. Why practice that?

1:43:49 How did you get there? Can you talk a little bit about it because it’s something that’s obviously gets a lot of interest and there’s a lot of strength there. Absolutely. I mean, the journey to handstands, just like the journey of all the other strength poses, it’s about facing the impossible and then keeping going. Face the impossible, keep going.

1:44:06 Face the impossible, keep going. And how strong can you be? Just keep being stronger. And just like anything else, if you want it, work for it. Work for it with good technique, get a teacher, learn the technique, you know, and just apply yourself.

1:44:18 Don’t go for big results. I’m gonna get my handstand today. No, you’re not. You’re gonna get a little stronger today and a little stronger tomorrow. And then two years from now, it’s gonna look a lot better.

1:44:28 So humble, be humble. Be willing to put in the work every day. Let it take as long as it takes and never give up. Does part of you dislike the handstand video because people see it and they don’t understand what it’s really about? The discipline, the this, that kind of thing, they just see it as a technique when there’s much more involved?

1:44:49 I don’t mind if they see it as a technique. I think anybody that sees it and gets inspired, I think is awesome. But anybody that sees it and gets discouraged, then I feel bad for people that get discouraged. So I think it’s really important to keep it real. And so this is why I write a lot about, hey, this is a video and you may see perfection, but remember, I’ve been practicing for 20 years and remember that this took me this time.

1:45:08 So I think it’s really important that people get inspired from the videos, rather than, again, rather than discouraged. Okay, and what’s the guilty pleasure we don’t know about the Kino engages in? Besides those television shows on airplanes that lead to Jesus’s presence, what is it? Because we see this amazing woman with the perfect body on Instagram, what is your advice? Guilty pleasure?

1:45:31 I mean, I love shopping. So, I mean, I feel like I think that it’s, I really, I enjoy fashion. I enjoy beautiful things. I love shopping. I don’t always buy things, but I love to look.

1:45:41 I’m a good shopper. I like to shop. So I would say shopping and maybe cupcakes. Okay, not too many of those on the diet, but every now and then. Yeah, I think there’s this vegan bakery that opens in Miami and they, I actually, even more than the cupcakes, they love icing.

1:46:02 So if you call ahead, they will actually, you get the cupcakes and they’ll give you extra servings of just the icing, which is like, wow. Wow, like on the side? Yeah. Oh my gosh. It’s kind of amazing.

1:46:13 That’s really hardcore. Super hardcore. Kino, I always ask everyone here a couple of questions at the end. I wanna ask you, you know, if you could pick up the phone and make a call to the 20-year-old Kino and give that young woman a bit of advice. I guess she wouldn’t have gone to India yet.

1:46:31 Maybe coming out of depression, maybe tried her first show of class, but what would you tell her? Yeah, when I was 20, I was on so many drugs. I don’t know if I would have listened. Prescribed ones or from Washington Square Park? Ones from Washington Square Park and wherever else I could possibly get them.

1:46:50 So, but what I was looking for. Was this to get away from yourself or was this just you being a youth and exploring options? I think a bit of both. So my drug of choice was ecstasy. I came from the ecstasy generation and I think I searched for solutions to my depression in ecstasy and in the sort of house music parties.

1:47:06 And, you know, I was partying really, really extensively, like just like almost professionally, you know? And I feel, I mean, ecstasy is sort of self-medication for depression. I remember that first ecstasy pill that I took. I was just like, wow. And then I was like, can I have another and another and another like years later was like, okay, this needs to stop.

1:47:27 Yeah, that’s a drug that I think can do some weird long-term effects on your brain. Yeah, I think, yeah. It also can do some amazing benefits. And I know there’s people on maps that are doing therapy with people. It was used as a marriage counseling drug in the 70s.

1:47:40 I think it can be very effective in PTSD as well. Absolutely. I think it also even self-limits you a little bit, as in, I’ve heard people say that you can only take so much as well. Yeah. Because there’s limiting returns.

1:47:53 But that doesn’t mean people don’t try to keep taking. Yeah, I mean, you can try. If one pill doesn’t work, you can try two at a time. If that doesn’t work, you can try three or four at a time. If that doesn’t work, there are other ways to get it into your system.

1:48:05 And then there are combinations that you can do. You’re well-versed. I am. So that’s what she was doing around there. Yeah, I think I would have gone.

1:48:12 I think I would have looked through in the eye and I would have said to her, you are beautiful and there’s nothing you can’t achieve. You have greatness inside of you. You know you want to be great. You know you have that inside of you. Find what it is that you want to be great at and go and do it.

1:48:30 You can do anything. Anything that you want. Go and do it. And I would ask her, what is it that you want to do right now? What is it?

1:48:38 Maybe it was yoga, maybe it’s something else. I don’t think I would have said yoga, it was something. And find that, you know? And do it and believe in it. Don’t ever limit your dreams, you know?

1:48:50 I remember when I was a little girl, I wanted to be a singer. And my dad, I don’t think that I naturally have a good singing voice. My dad, I think, heard me singing along to something and he said to me, and I said, I want to be a singer. I think this was pre-Supreme Court Justice. And then he said to me, oh sweetheart, I think you should consider something else.

1:49:11 I don’t think that’s your most natural talent, darling. And he was trying, I think, to save me of life of suffering and failure. But it kind of broke my heart. And I was just like, oh. You know, if I could go back to her, what I would tell her is ask your dad for singing lessons.

1:49:29 That’s what I would tell her. Okay, dad, can I have singing lessons? You know? Put me in singing lessons. And I think that’s, you know, so you have something and you want to do it.

1:49:40 Be bold enough to dream it. Do you thank, I don’t know, you give gratitude for kind of that crazy, twisted childhood that created Kino, the Kino that can get massively depressed and that can dream of being a Supreme Court Justice and then go on the ecstasy binge and now really inspire millions of people around the world. Do you kind of recognize that only that kind of weird, growing up would allow you to be kind of this great? Absolutely. I mean, everything that we have all experienced has been perfectly designed to make us exactly who we are.

1:50:14 And I feel like life keeps delivering us the lessons that we need to learn in various forms until we learn them. So it couldn’t be any other way because we couldn’t be anyone else. So it really is all perfect. Yeah, and I appreciate the honesty today. And some people will be like, oh my gosh, I didn’t realize all these facets of her.

1:50:32 But I find that when greatness comes here and sits in this chair, it’s always accompanied by manicness and this and this and this and that’s where that greatness comes from. It always comes from something that needs to be done, needs to be proved, needs to be sorted out inside of you. It’s not something that just comes out like you bake a cake and it’s done, you know? So yeah, I always recognize that, but that’s good advice. Yeah, I guess the ecstasy days is probably a way of not being your best, of taking a break from life and not being present and just giving yourself a pass, right?

1:51:06 And it was also this feeling of feeling almost glorious, you know, because that feeling of that moment, of that ecstasy high, that ecstasy, that rapturous moment, that wow, like could it really be this good? Yeah. You know? And then what, like could it really be this good? You know, could I really be this happy?

1:51:25 Right. It showed you a glimpse at what you could be as a human. Yeah. Is it even possible for a human being to experience this much happiness? Yeah. Yeah. And in that sense, it’s kind of a good thing.

1:51:36 Yeah. You know, to show you that that exists. Yeah. You got to walk through the door yourself. It may open the door, but you got to learn to walk through yourself.

1:51:42 Yeah. And you might have to work 10 years. Or 20. Or 20, just to get that moment. But you know, hence the rub. I love it.

1:51:48 Second part of that question is, best advice you’ve ever received in your life. Something someone said to you, a parent, Guruji, someone where it was just like, yeah, that’s got to be it.

1:52:07 Oh, that’s a hard question. It’s always the hardest one. Best advice that someone given to me. Well, I remember when I was first starting the practice, I had, there were all these things that I just decided that I didn’t want to try because I just thought I’ll never do them. That my butt’s too big or my arms are too short or I’m the wrong shape.

1:52:26 And I remember this woman, she just came to me, she just came up to this random person and who had seen me practice that day and she said, hey, why aren’t you trying to do that? And I just said, well, I can’t do it. My butt’s too big and my arms are too short. She said, you will totally be able to do that. You should try.

1:52:39 And I was like, huh, I should try. And that kind of, and so that’s, I think that we need to be brave enough to fail, brave enough to try. And that’s something I really have taken on. And what I think about that now is don’t quit before you try. If there’s something that you want, which you’ve decided that you’re not good enough for, at least try so that you can know you tried.

1:53:04 And if you failed, it’s okay. You gave your full, you gave your heart. And I think that’s okay. I think that this also brings up something that I’ve been thinking of recently is that we are, I feel like culturally obsessed with like number one, you know, like the gold medalist and the bestest. We use this the bestest in town, the best yoga teacher in town.

1:53:23 And we use that and I’m like, how many bests can there be, you know? And like how many of us can get a special award and a special and unique contribution? And I feel like, I don’t know if we need to be the best. I feel like almost like we need to have a new philosophy where we’re okay with whatever number we are. You know, so you’re number two, you’re also awesome, you know, and to be okay with that.

1:53:44 And so like, how can I live a meaningful life without needing to be like the best of my game and hold this on your shoulder like a trophy. And it’s not a sense of quitting, still strive for it, you know, and maybe it would be the best. But you also have to be okay with yourself in case, you know, your arrow misses its target a little bit. Yeah, I think you’re on to something there. And you know what, I just got finished with the second movie we made with Ido Portal.

1:54:07 And he says, he believes success is the wrong orientation. You know, it’s this tiny little container that you judge someone here and here and here and, you know, and we all kind of fawn after it. But like then what happens? And so there’s better orientations to put yourself in, you know, to go to your fears or to work on just your discipline practice or to try to embrace that struggle every day and get through it, as opposed to being the best of this or the best of that.

1:54:32 But yet, you know, especially in America, you know, that’s a winnings, a big thing, right? Yeah, exactly. It’s kind of programmed into you. We only put the gold medalists on the cereal boxes. Yeah, but we’ve all been successful at things and it can be this horrible, empty feeling.

1:54:45 And so what really makes you feel good is kind of getting through that struggle, knowing that you were disciplined, exploring things, going to where the fear is, trying, failing, trying, getting better, trying, realizing that the process is maybe a beautiful thing. Becoming a better person. Yeah, yeah. Last part of that question, to that 20-year-old that’s watching us right now and they could be in India, could be in Miami, South America, Asia, wherever they are, what advice do you give to them?

1:55:14 What can they do to, I don’t know, make a change in their lives or to one day grow up and be like Keno? What do you tell them? Be willing to put in the work, right? Dream big, but don’t wait for someone to knock on your door and deliver it to you. Put in the work and be humble about the work.

1:55:33 So don’t come in with a chip on your shoulder, I’m awesome and I deserve all this. Come in and say, how can I contribute? What can I add to this, right? Be willing to put in the work. Dream big and work your ass off.

1:55:47 Powerful words. Keno, thank you so much for coming on. You’re welcome. It’s been something we’ve been looking forward to for a few weeks, a few months. And I love the fact that you are unapologetic about what you’ve decided to do.

1:56:01 And as a fellow person who’s in the interwebs and has people that follow you and give you feedback and whatever you wanna call it, sometimes it’s difficult to do and people wanna put you in their version of what they think you are and tell you not to wear the skimpy shorts and you’re not honoring the yogurt tradition and why do you keep taking selfies of yourself? And if you’re a true yogi, why do you blow dry your hair? And why, is that mascara? What are you doing?

1:56:26 And oh, God forbid you’re making money off of that as an entrepreneur and as a woman and da, da, da, da. And it really takes a lot of courage to go out and put your stake in there and say, this is me, I’m comfortable with me. You can appreciate it, enjoy it, be inspired of it or not. And not a lot of people will do that. So thank you for being that person.

1:56:49 Thank you for being you. And yeah, for being real and telling us about your journey and also opening up about the ups and downs. I mean, so many people never get to see the pain behind what was here. And you’re telling me a moment that wasn’t 10 years ago, that was four years ago. So so many people struggle with so many of the things that you’re struggling with and that I struggle with and that they assume that these people on Instagram and YouTube are these perfect beings.

1:57:16 And yet, that’s not what we are. And for me, I’m six months into my yoga practice, but it’s a very special thing for me. Every Monday, it’s very important. I have a woman here named Palette Calm Quality who just instructs me and it’s something very special. And London Real was kind of created on us looking into psychedelic experiences and ayahuasca.

1:57:38 And you wouldn’t know about the suit, but we’re big fans of the psychedelic experience. But after my yoga practice lately, I’m going to go speak to the spirit God sometimes without those psychedelics. And it’s amazing that I can get there out of a somewhat simple and not as strenuous as my squat day or my Thai boxing sparring rounds. And yet I still get there. And so I tell everybody, you have to look into this yoga thing.

1:58:05 It doesn’t make sense scientifically. It doesn’t make sense from a physical trainer perspective, but there’s something really powerful happening here. And anyone who does it has that moment where it’s like, and like meditation, you might skip it and then you don’t know why something’s not right in your life. But I would highly encourage everybody to adopt some type of practice. And it’s different than meditation.

1:58:27 I’ve been meditating for a long time and I think that’s another crucial component in your life. But there is something about connecting with the body that is amazing. And it actually takes you funny enough out of your body. Yeah. Which is just hard to imagine.

1:58:42 And again, another theme of this recent movie is just kind of going into your body as a place to kind of go for that ultimate truth where we’re not gonna find it in a church necessarily or in a Bible or in a cell phone or in a business model or in a guru, but all the answers are inside you. Usually when you take language out of the equation, helps a lot. Absolutely. And when you take a personality out of the equation, you kind of see what’s important to you.

1:59:07 So thank you for reminding us of that. And yeah, it’s been a huge pleasure having you on. Thank you. I mean, I’m excited for your new book. That’s a 30-day practice that people can kind of jump into.

1:59:17 Yeah. Right? And was that the idea behind it to get people to do something? Yeah, to do something. And then also the yogi assignment is that yoga is a total life assignment.

1:59:26 So every day is built on a message from the wisdom tradition of yoga. And I give a little bit of sort of a talk about that. So for example, one of the days is ahimsara nonviolence. And so I’ll discuss a little bit about what that means and how to apply it in your life. And then each chapter each day includes three kind of takeaways, like life wisdom takeaways and three poses that you can use for reflection.

1:59:50 Okay, all right. So that’s all in there. Yeah. And people can find you on YouTube, on Instagram, on your television channel and hopefully find you where you can teach them somewhere around the world as well, right? Absolutely.

2:00:01 As we say on London Real, it’s about the journey. I wish you well on yours with all these amazing things you have coming up. And thank you for your teachings. It’s amazing to watch the little bits of pieces where I’ve seen you actually teaching and practicing and yeah, it’s really impressive and really inspiring. So from myself and the team at London Real, I say thank you and namaste.

2:00:23 Thank you, namaste.